About

The Misery Index: Terrible Games about Terrible Realities

$3,086

pledged of $3,000 goal

113

backers

The Misery Index will be a
collection of eight tabletop games about human suffering. Each game
approaches a different miserable topic with unique mechanics. Our
games tackle subjects ranging from racial and cultural violence to
sexual abuse, class conflict, and mental illness, and do so through
the lens of multiple genres, including science fiction, sword and
sorcery, cyberpunk, supernatural horror, and superhero fantasy.

Our goal is to produce a finished,
polished print and PDF version of this collection. More information
about our mission, our games, and the book itself can be found below.

Our Miserable Games

At Misery Tourism Games, we design tabletop games about vice,
inhumanity and suffering. We make terrible games about terrible
people in terrible situations.

We don't design games to make a moral point or push an agenda. We
don't design games to offend you or your sociology professor or your
congressman. We do it because we believe there is fun to be had in
exploring tragedy and depravity with your friends in the safety of
your kitchen, den or mother's basement.

Each game is played differently, and all of the games are designed
to be easy to learn, but hard to forget. The games draw inspiration
from a number of sources, including role playing games, board games,
card games, and improvisational theater. The mechanics have been
carefully chosen to compliment each game's subject matter.

The eight games that will be included in the collection are
described briefly below. If you want to give any of them a test
drive, you can access a fully playable alpha version of each game by
clicking on the link in its title.

Student/ZOMBIE: When an
attempted school shooting is interrupted by a zombie outbreak, the
shooters find themselves forced to assume a new, awkward role: that
of heroes.

Passing: A town in the Deep
South in the early 20th century is being terrorized by a
vampire, and the town elite—a group of old white aristocrats—is
determined to catch it. Unfortunately, the search threatens the
safety of a black man who has been secretly living among the white
elite for years.

The Needs of the Few:
Stranded on a deteriorating spaceship far from any inhabited planet,
a group of incompletely trained youths must try to survive while
struggling with the memories of the abuse they suffered at the hands
of their dead captain, whose ghost might still be on board.

Welfare Queens: It's
2084, and wealth has finally finished trickling down. Thanks to the
magic of laissez faire
economics, every American now lives a prosperous life. However, many
are still dissatisfied. These discontents turn to illegal virtual
reality dens where they escape their frustration and boredom by
living imaginary lives as poor people on welfare.

Mentors: A
troubled inner-city kid discovers that she has remarkable, perhaps
even supernatural, powers, and the only one who seems willing to help
her reach her full potential is her Urban Outreach mentor. Too bad he
has a devious ulterior motive.

6 Page Manual: This
is
game of serious, thematic role-playing. It is about things thought
about in dark room, at night waking, alone, but now experienced as
party game with good friends. In 6 Page Manual you
will put yourself in shoe leather of suffering persons throughout
world, face their difficulty, and overcome—or fail!

The Oldest, Cruelest Sword: It's
a fairy tale premise: a well-intentioned thief sets out to steal a
magical sword from an evil sorceress. But nothing is ever so simple,
and soon he is lost inside her tower and trapped in a cycle of sadism
and sexual aggression.

Danse Macabre: Death
is inevitable, so why not have fun with it? Danse
Macabre
allows players to live the final days and moments of characters
doomed to die, and, ultimately, to assume the role of Death itself.

Our Miserable Book

Sample Cover #1

Our plan is to present all eight games
in a single volume. We've put a lot of thought into how to create a
book that will actually be used in play. We want the book to be an
active, useful part of the game, not a reference manual or a fetish
object.

To that end, we've decided on a large
11” square book with wire-o binding and thick, durable pages. This
will allow the book to lie open on any flat surface, and will be
perfect for including game boards, diagrams and charts that can be
seen and used by multiple players at once.

Layout design will be provided by
Jonathan Walton, who has worked on a number of independent games and
supplements, including Mortal Coil Revised and Dark Heart
of the Dreamer.

Sample Cover #2

Additional details—color vs. black &
white, the number of illustrations, the thickness of the cover—will
be dependent on how successful the project is. We're committed to
producing the best book we can with our resources.

Our Miserable Praise

Here are some nice things that people
have said about our terrible games:

“I don't care if you are fooling or
not, I just read Passing and it is terrible and excellent.”
- Jason Morningstar, creator of Fiasco and Grey Ranks

“I
guess the biggest surprise is that someone hasn't done this already
considering how well all the parts fit together.” - Ron Edwards,
creator of Sorcerer
and co-founder of The Forge, on Danse Macabre

“So if you want to find in the games narrative
catharsis, deep content and real problems, and at the same time you
can play such as sexually frustrated pacifist working in the factory
of chemical weapons and telling racist jokes in the company of
melancholy housewife addicted to online poker, which allows acts of
vandalism—recommended.” - Grynarracyjne.pl on 6
Page Manual [translation courtesy of
Google]

Contact Us

If you have any questions or feedback
about this project, feel free to email us.

You can also find more information
about this project and our games in general at miserytourism.com.

Risks and challenges

We are committed to making this project a success! We have quotes from printers, and we've done a few preliminary budgets that include estimated printing and shipping & packaging costs, and we're confident that we can deliver on budget.

We have drafts of all of the games complete, so the only steps standing between us and a completed book are editing, layout, printing and shipping. We have 5 months to complete these steps in order to hit our estimated January 2014 delivery date. We believe we can do this.

That doesn't mean delays are impossible. This is our first time producing something on this scale, so our timeline may be off. If that's the case, we will be very direct and upfront in our project updates.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $35 or more
About $35

You get a PDF of The Misery Index: International Pirate Edition, plus all of the information a printer will need to produce a physical copy of the book, and express permission to produce as many books as you would like to distribute to other international gamers.

Only two rules apply: (1) You can only distribute these copies outside of the United, and (2) you can't charge more for a copy than it costs you to produce.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $135 or more
About $135

We will design a hack of one of our games just for you. You pick the game and the miserable subject or setting that you would like to explore, and we'll create something just for you, and send you the exclusive PDF. Want to play Passing with a white supremacist gang inside a maximum security prison? This is your chance. You will also receive the Misery Index book and PDF.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $250 or more
About $250

We'll make a terrible game just for you. All you have to do is tell us what controversial subject matter you want to play with, what genre you want it mixed with, and a vague sense of the type of game you want, and we'll make the game and send you a PDF. Want a game about homophobia seen through the lens slapstick children's cartoons with drinking game mechanics? No problem. And, of course, you get the Misery Index book and PDF as well.